Hall of Mirrors
by Grac3
Summary: Part one of the Angel!Verse. While trying to catch a bat-like alien loose in an antiques shop, Rose notices something strange about the Doctor's reflection. Episode tag: Post-Aliens of London/World War Three. Threeshot.
1. A Time Lord's Reflection

**Warning:** Mild violence

**Disclaimer: Don't own Doctor Who (or Pokémon, referenced in this chapter)**

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Chapter 1 – A Time Lord's Reflection

They had been running through the hall of mirrors for fifteen minutes now, and it was beginning to give her a headache. All she would see for what felt like an eternity was her own reflection, from all angles; occasionally, she would see the corner of the Doctor's jacket, or the wing of the Waybuh – but it was only ever a reflection of the true thing, and never the thing itself.

It had been a few weeks since they had blown up 10 Downing Street, and, after visiting several planets and having more than a few adventures – some that she would be telling her mother about, and some that she definitely wouldn't – Rose had asked the Doctor if she could visit home for a few hours again. He had obliged, but only on the condition that he was going to stay inside the TARDIS for the duration of her visit, and if Jackie Tyler even thought about trying to get inside the blue box to yell at him again, he was off to the moon without a moment's notice until she calmed down.

The Doctor had landed the TARDIS on the Powell Estate exactly one week – and forty five minutes – after 10 Downing Street had been destroyed, and Rose had burst through the door, shutting it behind her as she went…

Only to burst back through a moment later and demand of the Time Lord exactly where they were – at which point he, too, had left the TARDIS, half-suspecting that this was a trap and that Jackie was awaiting him on the other side of the door with a frying pan or an iron or an anvil and that in a few moments he was going to be in an incredible amount of pain, only to find that they emerged in a quaint, semi-rural town in, what he guessed, was Hertfordshire.

"Ah," he had said, rather unhelpfully, going up to the window of a nearby café and looking through it to the calendar that was hung on the wall behind the counter. "But it _is_ a week after Downing Street," he offered, turning back to Rose, who was standing with her hands on her hips and her head cocked to one side in a pose that reminded him so much of her mother that he took a half-step backwards.

"My mum does _not_ live in Hertfordshire!" she snapped, taking a step closer to the Doctor.

"Alright, alright! I'll fix this," the Doctor conceded, going to turn to back to the TARDIS – when he got distracted by a sandwich board propped up in front of a newsagents. Frustrated by the man's infernally short attention span, Rose followed him as he approached the board, transfixed, and read the headline that had been written in capital letters and held in place with wire mesh:

_THIRD ATTACK IN SEVEN DAYS – POLICE FEAR ESCAPED ANIMAL_

"An escaped animal?" Rose asked, now admittedly intrigued herself.

"Unlikely," the Doctor mumbled, looking all around the small town square lined with shops in which the TARDIS had materialised. "Nowhere round here for an animal to escape from." He turned back to Rose, wearing that expression that pretended to ask permission for him to do something that he was going to do anyway.

"You think it's alien?" she asked.

He nodded, his face breaking out into a wide beam. Rose tried to stand her ground on a matter of principle, but found that, in the light of another – possibly dangerous – alien incursion on her home planet, it was rather difficult to pretend that she would rather be screamed at by her mother for not coming back within the promised ten seconds.

But she wasn't going to let the Doctor know that.

She sighed. "I'm not going home, am I?" she asked.

"Not yet," he grinned, taking her hand in his and running off in the direction of their latest adventure.

They investigated for two hours, finding out the nature of the attacks and that – mercifully – those involved had only been injured, not killed. They took a trip to the nearest hospital in the TARDIS – and the fact that they made it to the right place this time rather than ending up on stage in the Sydney Opera House made Rose very suspicious indeed – to talk to one of the victims, who described the 'monster', as they called it, as a bat about the size of a pigeon, but with arms, legs, claws, and perfect vision in its bright yellow eyes.

"Sounds a bit like a Zubat, but with arms," the Doctor had remarked once they got back to the control room.

"A Zubat?" Rose had enquired, wanting to know where in the universe that alien hailed from – only to be faced with a confused look from her companion, as though she should have known exactly what he was talking about. "What?" She wondered if he had spoken of Zubatland once while he was under the grating, fixing things, and she had either not heard him or simply not been listening.

"Didn't you ever watch Pokémon?" he asked.

"No."

The Doctor had scoffed at this. "You humans, you go on and on about TV, but you never seem to watch anything good."

In the end, the Doctor had managed to identify the alien as a Waybuh, a small creature with bat-like wings and four limbs equipped with sharp claws – that came from a planet that, after ten minutes of trying, Rose couldn't pronounce, but that in its natural habitat, it was a rather timid creature.

"I've no idea how it ended up on earth, but it must be terrified. If we can find it and take it home, the attacks will stop."

They eventually tracked it down to a large antiques shop on the edge of the town – which Rose thought looked more like a warehouse full of old junk than a shop – and had gone in to find the owner and the staff cowering under the desk, and the ringing sounds of smashing antiques echoing from deeper within the shop.

The Doctor had blagged their way in with the psychic paper, claiming that they were pest control experts, and sent all of the terrified shop workers home.

"How do we catch it?" Rose asked.

"Simple: we knock it out. Good blow to the head should do it," the Doctor explained, pulling two golf clubs out of a golf bag next to a glass cabinet filled with jewellery and tossing one over to Rose, who caught it deftly and swirled it round in her hand.

And so they set off in pursuit of the Waybuh, following the sounds of destruction all through the shop, until they tracked it down to a room that was set out like a maze, where all of the walls were made of mirrors.

It was the most disorientating room that Rose had ever been in. Everywhere she looked, she saw an infinite number of herself and the other mirrors in the room, as all the mirrors faced each other and reflected the reflections back and forth so that each one seemed to lead down a long tunnel of the same image repeated over and over.

She wasn't sure when she and the Doctor had got separated, and she saw him in the mirrors so often that she found herself not entirely sure that they had been separated at all. She merely wandered around the room, taking each step carefully and cautiously in case she was not walking towards a legitimate space but a reflection and she would soon collide with a mirror. From the sound of the thundering footsteps somewhere else in the room, she guessed that the Doctor was not being as cautious. She hoped that she wouldn't have to pull glass shards out of his face when they got back to the TARDIS.

It was when she turned a corner – or, rather, she thought that she was turning a corner, but was in actuality just turning towards a mirror – that she saw it.

It wasn't the Doctor, of that she was certain. Nor did she even think that it was his reflection; it may have been a reflection of a reflection, but it wasn't his physical form.

For, although the person who flashed passed in the mirror had the appearance of the Doctor – the same short hair, the same leather jacket, the same grey jumper – there was something very different about that person to the Doctor she knew.

It was gone in a second, however, and she was left in doubt as to whether she had seen it at all.

Then she saw something suspended in the air behind her: a bat-like creature about the size of a pigeon, but with arms and legs and bright purple skin.

The Waybuh.

Not entirely sure if it was worth it, or if she was going to hear an almighty crash and be covered with shards of glass once she had done so, Rose turned on her heel and swung the golf club up and over her head. The head of the club hit something that was caught with the motion and thudded into the ground. The Waybuh lay there twitching its wings for a while before it stilled, unconscious and ready to be returned to its home planet.

Rose called for the Doctor, declaring that she had caught the Wayhuh and that they could leave. It took a whole ten minutes – during which Rose had to sing 'Ten Green Bottles' through twice so that he could follow her voice – for the Doctor to find her, and another fifteen before they found their way out of the hall of mirrors, both disorientated and feeling the internal pressure of imminent headaches.

They made their way back to the TARDIS with the Waybuh, ready to take it home, but Rose was still thinking of what she had seen in the hall of mirrors. For it may not have been a reflection, but a mere reflection of a reflection, but whatever it was and however many mirrors may have been reflecting the same image, she was sure that it had been the Doctor's reflection, and she was sure that, in his reflection, he had wings.


	2. A Time Lord's Purpose

**A.N.:** Thank you to Hume for his Copy Principle which was very helpful in finding a way to explain a certain aspect of the wings phenomena.

**Warning:** Very strong religious references in this chapter

**Disclaimer: Don't own Doctor Who**

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Chapter 2 – A Time Lord's Purpose

It transpired, when they took the Waybuh home to the planet which Rose still couldn't pronounce the name of, that the creature who had been wreaking havoc in the small town of Hertfordshire was, in fact, an adolescent. As soon as the TARDIS landed, the Doctor's scan for alien tech had picked up a signal beaming from the highest tower in the city that they found themselves in. It took a few minutes for the TARDIS to interpret, but in the end they discovered that it was a distress call: a pair of Waybuh begging the populace of the planet to return their child if they found it.

The signal brought back bad memories for Rose.

They had wandered through the city until they found the house of the Waybuh parents, to return the – now awake – creature to its family. Adult Waybuh were much bigger than the pigeon-sized teenager; they were almost as tall as Rose, and could stand upright on their two legs while using their other pair of limbs much like arms. The couple that opened the door to them were so grateful that they had returned their child that they immediately invited them in for tea. The Doctor had almost declined on domestic grounds, but Rose forced him to accept their offer.

The food provided by the Waybuh looked nothing like anything she had ever seen on Earth, though it was delicious; but even the food couldn't distract her from thinking about what she had seen in the hall of mirrors.

She wished the image had not been so fleeting, that she had had more time to take a proper look at what it was that she had seen. It was perfectly possible that she had imagined it, that the perplexing array of reflections and images had caused her to start seeing things that were not there at all. If the Doctor had noticed her distraction during dinner, he didn't mention it until they got back to the control room.

"Okay, spill," he said, flicking a few switches on the control panel to deposit them safely in the Time Vortex. He placed his palms on the edge of the panel and leaned forward slightly, looking over at Rose, who was leaning against the railing.

"Sorry?" she asked, being drawn out of her reverie again.

"You've been a million miles away since we left Hertfordshire. If you still have a headache, go lie down, I don't have time to listen to you moaning." He pushed himself off of the control panel and looked away, fiddling with various dials in an attempt to look busy until she left, as he no doubt expected her to.

"I don't still have a headache," she told him truthfully, drawing his attention again. His brow furrowed slightly.

"Then what is it?"

Rose sighed, looking up to the ceiling of the control room and folding her arms over her stomach before dropping her head again so that her chin was resting on her chest and her gaze was fixed on the grating beneath her feet.

"It's…" she began, trying to figure out how to word her enquiry. On the face of it, it sounded ridiculous – yet there was a part of her that reminded her that there probably wasn't much that the Doctor had not heard, both the ridiculous and the perfectly sane – and she had no idea whether or not he was going to be angry, or laugh at her, or do something completely unexpected. She looked up at his still confused face, and finished lamely, "it's nothing."

The Doctor flicked a large switch on the control panel down, and all of the background noises that she had been getting used to over the past few weeks were suddenly silenced: the humming of the TARDIS and the beeping of various instruments – it was the equivalent of stopping a lift while it was between floors in the shaft. The silence was odd, almost tangible, and Rose felt as though it was pressing in on her from all sides.

"Rose Tyler, I know when it's nothing," the Doctor said, taking a few steps towards her and turning away from the control, "and this is not nothing." He crossed his arms over his chest and Rose, now very conscious of the fact that their poses almost mirrored each other, reached behind to curl her fingers around the metal bar at the top of the railing against which she was leaning. She jutted her bottom jaw out to one side, considering her wording carefully.

"I saw something," she decided to begin, "in the hall of mirrors. I saw your reflection, and there was something… odd about it."

The Doctor drained all emotion from his face. "What was odd about it?" Rose could tell that he already knew exactly what she was going to say next, and he wasn't going to let it go until she spit it out.

"You had… wings."

The Doctor didn't react at all: his expression did not change in the slightest, and he didn't move an inch. It was a tense moment, in which Rose didn't know quite what to do. When he did speak, she couldn't see why what he said was relevant.

"Language is a funny thing," he said, unfolding his arms and turning back to the controls, skipping sideways around the control as he adjusted switches and dials and pressed buttons. Rose pushed herself off of the railing and attempted to follow him around the centre control panel, but he was always on the other side of the glass cylinder that rose from its centre up to the ceiling. Around them, the TARDIS roared back into life, and they were on the move again, the familiar screeching filling the control room as they landed somewhere.

"Language?" she asked, frustrated that the man just _wouldn't keep still_.

"Yeah. Take the word 'chip' for example. 'Chip' means 'chip'. Right?" The Doctor appeared from around the cylinder to accompany his query with a quizzical look. When Rose answered in the affirmative, he continued moving around the console so that she couldn't see him.

"Except it doesn't. In England, 'chip' means a hot potato thing, what is known in America as a 'fry'. And in America, a 'chip' refers to a cold potato thing that is known in England as a 'crisp'."

Rose sighed exasperatedly, tired of following him around the room and stopping in place. Yet as soon as she had stopped, he stopped as well, so that they were still separated by the console and unable to see each other.

"What does this have to do with what I saw?"

"The same is true of other words. In England, 'lord' refers to a man in a high position, with authority of people or a place. In Gallifreyan, 'lord' refers to an individual who takes care of something, what would be known in England as a 'guardian'."

The pieces of the puzzle that the Doctor was presenting to her began to assemble in Rose's mind, yet the final piece eluded her, and she still couldn't quite understand what he was trying to tell her. "So, you mean…"

The Doctor stepped out from behind the console, but did not move any closer to her. "Time Lords are not _lords_ of time, at least not in the sense that you would understand the word. We're more… _guardians_ of time, charged with looking after it."

Rose closed her eyes briefly, letting this new information sink in. When she looked back up at the Doctor, he was wearing a pleading expression, imploring her to understand. He took a step forward, his hands outstretched and his palms facing upwards, but his elbows were still clamped to his sides.

"Why do you think we keep ending up in the wrong place? In 1869 in Cardiff when we were supposed to be in 1860 in Naples? In Hertfordshire when we were supposed to be in London? I have the power to go anywhere, in all of time and space, but that comes with responsibility. I have to help when it's needed. It's how I met you."

Rose wished that he would stop talking for a minute, for her head was spinning. Countless questions formed in her mind, all battling for dominance and the right to be the first to leave her lips. Yet she kept returning to a single phrase that the Doctor had used in his explanation, something that didn't seem to make any sense, something that she had to clarify.

"Charged by _who_?"

The Doctor gave her a lopsided smile, dropping his hands to his sides. "God."

"God?" Rose parroted, disbelieving. The Doctor nodded.

"You humans, you think that science and God are at war with each other. You know, a woman committed suicide after the Slitheen crashed that fake spaceship into Big Ben, driven to taking her own life because 'science had won' and she lost her faith. In your heads, the more that science can explain, the less needs to be explained with the supernatural. You never seem to stop and think about where all the scientific principles and laws come from, cause people like Newton and Einstein might have discovered them, but they didn't create them."

Rose chuckled. "So, what? God is like… the ultimate scientist?"

The Doctor gave her a warm smile, the kind he wore when he was impressed. "If you like."

Rose smirked, taking a step closer to him. "So you're like… an angel?"

The Doctor's smile dropped, and he cleared his throat awkwardly. He looked away, off into some space behind her, as though he suddenly couldn't look her in the eye. "No," he admitted, clasping his hands behind his back and rocking forward on the balls of his feet. "That's… something different altogether."

Rose chuckled, looking forward to the day when she would find out why that was. "But why can't I see them now?" She looked at the spaces either side of the Doctor, at the empty spaces that, when she had seen his reflection in the hall of mirrors, had been filled with a pair of wings.

"Because humans are weak," the Doctor explained matter-of-factly. "There are some things that certain races can't see, because it would damage them to see those things. Humans can't look directly into the sun for too long, and they can't look at a Time Lord's wings for too long either."

"But I saw them in the mirror."

"Reflections are different. Reflections are weaker copies of the original thing, and you're strong enough to see the reflection of the wings."

Rose nodded absent-mindedly, still staring at in wonder at the empty spaces. She had stood by his side, in those spaces. She should have felt them – she would have been standing in the middle of them; she should have felt feathers brushing against her, and the sense that there was something there that she couldn't see. As if he had been reading her mind, the Doctor answered the question that she hadn't actually asked.

"It's not only that humans are too weak to _see_ them; you can't perceive them either. They can be detected by no human senses," he explained quickly, unclasping his hands from behind him and letting them hang by his side.

A sudden flood of disappointment washed over her, a sense akin to that of having something ripped away from her.

"So…" she said slowly, shifting slightly, "I can never see them?"

The Doctor smiled, that mischievous grin that preceded him saying something that Rose was going to like.

"I didn't say that. I said you couldn't look at them for too long."

Rose was finding that smile infectious, the crushing disappointment being replaced with an excitement that she had only ever felt in this very room. The Doctor walked over to her, and raised his hands to either side of her head. He raised his brow slightly, asking permission, and she granted it with a swift nod. He placed his middle and third fingers on the side of her head, just above her ears.

"Close your eyes," he murmured, and she did.

On the inside of her eyelids, she saw a door, closed and preventing her from crossing its threshold. She walked up to it, and it opened – not fully, only just far enough to allow her slip through the gap.

Once she was on the other side, she opened her eyes.


	3. A Time Lord's Wings

**A.N.:** Thank you to www. bakura .co .uk (no spaces) for the diagrams of wing anatomy.

**Disclaimer: Don't own Doctor Who**

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Chapter 3 – A Time Lord's Wings

Rose felt her jaw drop. A part of her had still been sceptical up to that point, stubbornly refusing to believe that what she had seen could possibly have been true. Yet now, she had no choice but to accept that this was reality, that she hadn't imagined what she had seen in the hall of mirrors.

As the Doctor lowered his hands, he folded his arms over his chest and stood up as straight as he could. The muscles in his shoulders tightened, tautening the wings as he flexed them, straightening them out to their full wingspan.

Each wing was, Rose estimated, eight feet from his spine to their tips, large feathers reaching out beyond him, each one at least a foot in length. They looked luscious, a shiny quality making them glint slightly in the lighting of the TARDIS control room. The entire wings were deep black, yet the primaries were a dark red, as though they had been dipped in blood.

They were, in a word, gorgeous.

Rose was vaguely aware of the Doctor watching her as her gaze flowed over the wings in awe, taking in every aspect of the wondrous limbs, finding new things about them with each second that passed: how one of the feathers seemed to have been ripped at some point, missing its tip and being much shorter than those surrounding it, or how some of them closest to his body were actually a deep blue rather than pure black, but the two colours flowed so seamlessly into each other that it was almost impossible to find the point at which one colour ended and the next began.

"They're amazing," she murmured, the words leaving her lips almost of their own accord, just to fill the heavy silence that had fallen over the two of them. The Doctor didn't reply, and she continued to drink in the wonder of the wings. They reminded her of the large birds of prey that she had seen in textbooks at school, flexed in flight as they carried the animals through the air.

A thought suddenly struck her, one that made her snap her gaze to meet the Doctor's own. His brow furrowed slightly, wondering what was going through her mind.

"You can fly," she said, chuckling slightly; yet the smile melted from her face as he looked away, dropping his gaze to the floor between them. "Can't you?"

It was a moment before the Doctor replied, as though he was choosing his words very carefully. "No," he answered finally.

Rose frowned. "Why not?"

The Doctor looked up, though his eyes were slightly glazed over, as though he was casting his mind back to something that had happened a long time ago. "They were damaged," he explained.

"They look fine to me," Rose countered swiftly, casting her eyes over the wings once more. Yet when she looked back at the Doctor's face, he was wearing that small smile that said nothing other than 'bless you': a smile that was always accompanied with that intense and seemingly ever-present sadness in his eyes that had been there ever since she had met the Doctor, but that she wished she could rid him of.

"I was injured just after I regenerated into this form. My wings were shattered and, even though I had enough residual regeneration energy to mend them, I didn't have enough to return them to full strength. There's nothing physically wrong with them, but they can't support my weight."

"Well, I keep telling you to keep off the custard tarts," Rose joked, earning herself a genuine, if weak, smile. She stared at the wings as the feathers rustled slightly. They looked perfect, bearing no signs of having ever been damaged. "So you'll never fly again?"

The Doctor shook his head. "Not until I regenerate," he murmured, a forlorn tone to his voice.

Regeneration was one of the first things that the Doctor had explained to her about Time Lords and their world, after she had had a go at him about his vagueness when they returned to her time after seeing the world burn in the year 5,000,000,000. If he could 'forget' to mention that the TARDIS influenced her brain to translate languages, then she suspected that there was a lot of other things that he had not told her that she would want to know about.

All things considered, she was rather grateful that he had started with the concept of regeneration – after all, it was surely the worst thing that he had to tell her about. That he could, one day, be killed in front of her, and not remain dead but turn into a completely different man – or become a woman, for he informed her that gender swaps were not completely unheard of in the regeneration process – and not even be afforded the opportunity to grieve, was a terrifying prospect.

What if the person he became didn't like her; what if he thought her too annoying or too stupid to be a worthy companion of his during his travels? And then there was the simple fact that _her_ Doctor, the Doctor who had taken her hand in the basement of Henrik's and told her to run, would be lost forever; replaced with another, completely different version of himself.

It was something that she desperately tried to push to the back of her mind as they travelled together, and one that she felt that she had been, up to that point, sufficiently shielding herself from. Even now, directly faced with what had become, over the last few weeks, her worst nightmare, she tried to remain calm, hiding her terror and anxiety.

"So, you get new wings as well?" she asked quietly. "When you…" She trailed off, not even wanting to let the word leave her lips.

The Doctor nodded. "Every time. Last time they were completely black, then when I changed, I got these red bits."

Rose nodded absent-mindedly, wanting to change the subject as soon as possible; the sooner they stopped talking about regeneration, the sooner she could once more banish it to the far corners of her mind.

Almost without her permission, her hand raised, her fingers reaching out to the delicate feathers of the wings before her. She flicked her eyes to the Doctor's, silently asking permission. With a small movement of his head, he granted it. She gave him a small smile of thanks, and gently pressed her fingertips against the wings.

She didn't quite know what she had been expecting them to feel like, but it wasn't that they would be so soft. The quills slid underneath her fingers so that she could barely feel them. She followed the wingspan out from the Doctor's body, having to take steps sideways until she reached the bright red primaries – which were somehow even softer than the black feathers she had already felt. As she trailed her fingertips over the red feathers, they bristled slightly – almost as if her touch was tickling them.

Suddenly, the wings began to move, curling around and brushing against her arm. They pushed her slowly back until she was standing directly in front of the Doctor again, and the wings were wrapped around them both like a cocoon. The lights from the TARDIS seemed to dim, unable to filter through the closely-knit feathers. As she followed the arc of the canopy with her eyes, she noticed the Doctor unfold his arms.

Rose smiled slightly, stepping forward and wrapping her arms around the Doctor's waist and resting her head against his jumper-clad chest. He returned the hug, as he always did, holding just that little bit tighter than necessary, as though the hordes of Genghis Khan had suddenly acquired some magnificent alien technology and were about to burst through the doors of the TARDIS and wrestle her away from him, dragging her away to never be seen again.

She wasn't sure exactly how long they stayed there like that, only that when he spoke, it hadn't been long enough.

"Rose?" he asked quietly, that strange edge to his voice when he was near domestic cutting through her name. It conveyed such an intense sadness that Rose wasn't sure how he didn't break under the strain of it.

Rose lifted her head and looked up at the Doctor, though she kept her arms around him. His features conveyed no particular emotion, though there was a kind of despair rolling in the waves of his bright blue eyes.

"Time's up," he murmured sadly, and she nodded in understanding. Looking up, she followed the impressive arc of the wings – still encasing both of them – one last time before he raised his hands to the side of her head, and she closed her eyes.

Once more she saw the door in her mind, slightly ajar and light pouring through the gap from the other side. It closed slowly, shutting with a click. When she opened her eyes again, the wings were gone, with mere empty space in their place.

Then, all of a sudden, the dark, introspective Doctor had disappeared as well, replaced with the happy, grin-y Doctor who was always longing for adventure and finding trouble. He clapped his hands excitedly and leaped around in a semi-circle to race up to the control panel and begin flicking switches and pressing buttons, like a kid at Christmas. Around them, the TARDIS whirred into life, ready to take them away from wherever the Doctor had parked her to wherever they needed to be.

"So, Rose Tyler," the Doctor grinned, poking his head out from around the cylinder in the centre console, "where to next?"

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**A.N.2:** When the Doctor says that his wings were completely black 'last time', he's referring to the War Doctor (i.e. John Hurt) rather than the Eighth Doctor (i.e. Paul McGann).

**A.N.3:** I have planned several stories in this series, so it will be continued. The next story will be another threeshot set after The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. I will update this chapter when it has been posted.

**UPDATE 16/06/14:** Part two of the Angel!Verse, Crimson, has been uploaded.


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